Of Revelation and Truth
by Invariant
Summary: Post-ep for 4X14. "There isn't a way he can find what isn't really there. He'll never go back to where he's never been." Olivia must convince Peter who she is, and how they got here.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. I just like to play with them**

**Spoilers: A Better Human Being, The End of All Things, especially. **

**Can't say this is strictly cannon. In my mind, The Observer could have showed up again, un-injured, because of the way they travel along time. I write merely with the intention of penning my ideas. ****Ultimately, it is one story, just spread into three different chapters due to its length. Thought it would be easier to read that way. **

**Thanks to all my readers! You guys keep my muse happy. Please R&R. Reviews are like cookies! :)**

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><p>Four in the morning brings a dimly lit side-street, wet concrete and asphalt reflecting the copper-gold of streetlights.<p>

Her feet trek in memory, through the deep cracks of his sidewalk, watered over fissures in the pavement she re-traces through the black of ripe darkness.

Second-hand rain trickles down the eaves of his roof, falling onto the concrete porch she now stands in, under the soft splatters of a once angry sky.

It's too gray here outside, too cold and too wet, an unnerving atmosphere to reminiscent of the winding emotional storm that brought her here in the first place.

It's a torrid madness that's aching in her head, a tight pull in her chest of longing and fear that threatens to break down every helpless cell in her body.

This is the first time she's been back here, since that night she remembered, since the day when this porch didn't belong to a stranger anymore but a man she's spent four years of her life with in a world time intended to forget.

Four days ago, Peter Bishop was no longer a stranded solider, a valiant, brillant mystery dropped effortlessly into her world of Fringe things, instead he was a welcome memory, a beautiful, warm body fueling her senses with the comfort of a past lost to consequence, and repercussion.

Three years, three years of history had attacked somehow her frontal lobe, visions hewed through migraines and bone to flash, steadily, behind her eyelids and under her skin. Nothing had ever been so vivid, so strikingly aggressive with it's ferocity to claim her, to bind her without chains to a story that re-wrote her before-life.

With confidence, and without fear, her lost-past arrested her, melted into her pores, comforted her through lived experiences, and the skin charged reaction of a cell-binding connection. She felt Peter in her fingertips, crawling up her spine, echoing in her blood with hots spikes of relentless current, impulses firing on the ends of any and every thought-up spectrum.

It was an excitement of her body, filling the brash emptiness of her without-him life.

And four days ago she told him this, and four days ago, after he'd fought his way through the private struggle of a dark grey-confusion, she saw in his eyes that he knew who she was.

Not a version anymore, of a woman he loved, but the very one, the one who carries his pulse in her own with the magnetic adherence of mated souls.

She'd seen, under the green-auroa of a gas station pagoda, the momentary release he'd allowed himself in the glourious seconds he'd accepted her as his. And the memory of his taste hadn't compared to the majestry of his kiss in that car, a desperation swelling passion, and need and love and hunger, his veracity matched with her own, a re-incarnation of all the stolen moments a new time-line tore from them both.

That night, she'd been resurrected by love, only to be buried alive again from it.

She presses into the wood of his door, a waft of damp oak mixed with the air of late wet-winter. It stings her lungs, chills the knuckles she has paused in a fist, the trepidation to knock a rapid anxiety under her sternum.

_It's best that I stay away_, he'd told her, before he'd left, stranded her outside her taunting cage, the building Jones had trapped her in, the one she'd left smoking in the wake of her cortexpihan exhaustion, her whole body tortured inside out by the power of her ability that knows only his air.

_I saw what I'd wanted to se_e, he'd said, backing away, _I don't know what's happening but you can't be mine._ And he spoke of betrayal, of loving the alter-version of her in a past where she'd had her once life lived for her, a mistake she long ago forgave him in the waiting arms of thier future. But he wouldn't understand that this wasn't the same, couldn't hear her plead-out bittersweet agony in the tone of a different circumstance.

The her he wants is the her she is now, his greatest desire existing on a different plane of existence.

Standing there, in the pouring rain, he wouldn't see it. Because he wanted to spare her his misery, the kind he blamed himself for sensitizing her with. But she wasn't empathetically familiarizing, because his pain didn't become hers, it was hers, a sinew deep ache that shouted after him in words of love lost and dying hope.

But he still walked away, abandoned her amidst the whirl of sirens and prodding fingers, emergecy responders treating her abrasions, unable to treat at all the wound he'd left her slowly bleeding-out from.

And as she stands here now, under the only dry patch of his doorway, she feels the raw-red of the cut that aches in every part of her, that spills into some mild form of panic that seizes her every muscle.

He seeks distance, in a stubbornly, misguided attempt to help her re-claim what identity he thinks he's stolen from her. _I can't be near her,_ he'd told Astrid, who hours later relayed the message,_ for her sake, it's best I stay away._ And so he's expecting she oblige him, counting on her respect for his boundaries to keep her away from this doorstep, but she can't put respect in a search that has no end to its suspect.

There's isn't a way he can find what isn't really there. He'll never go back to where he's never been.

As convinced as she is of all of it, of who she is, and who she's been, of who he is and where they are, she has the most confidence in the why of it all, in the how of how they got here, in the how of why he stayed.

Most especially, she feels the truth of revelation beating her heart to a wild drum, answers that led her here, to his house, waiting to be set free behind a threshold she was urged to crossover.

In this world, and the last.

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><p><em>It happened three hours ago, when the watching man appeared, rustling her awake from a sleep she found no solace in anyway.<em>

_"I do not have much time."_

_He'd said, with an odd cadence, after she'd instinctively grabbed her weapon in the prime of surprise. Between fear and panic had been recognition, knowledge of the familiar voice in the darkness of her room, the words of a shadow lurking at the foot of her bed._

_"What do you want? Why are you here?"_

_She'd asked, and he moved, inched closer to the end of her drawn gun, an illumination of bald flesh tones under the slates of moonlight drawn in from her window._

_"You must make him understand before it is too late."_

_His eyes were beady, unfocused, trying to grasp on to her face in the blind depth of early morning. And she couldn't make sense of him, not his presence or his meaning, and though she knew he carried no threat, she hugged the black steel tighter in her palms._

_"What are you talking about? Make who understand?"_

_Her mind was delirious, grappling on the verge of confusion, when the bald man tilts his head, cocks it tight like a straighting pin._

_"He did not receive my communication as I had intended." he's said. " I could not comprehend why he has reappeared, but I suspect it is because of you, of your connection to him. You would not let him be erased."_

_This makes her think, grasp at points through indistinction, and as she latches on to clear thought , her grip slackens, overwhelmed now instead at the mention of a man whose own mind encountered this being's fanatical psyche._

_He'd come to her, because of Peter, the Observer, and he'd paid her a visit out of a pressing importance, a re-analyzing of a subconscious state shared through the integration of brain waves and wires._

_A re-direct of a lost man's mis-perception, this had been the motive of her one a.m visitor, she'd made this out from the dots she'd been connecting through her deductive intuition._

_Whatever he'd told Peter days ago, fell on misinterpretation's deaf ears._

_She tried to question that what, but before she grasped onto the words, he echoed, without speaking, into the halls of her own mind._

_"You are capable of so much Olivia." It was a slow, careful reverberation of a hair-raising telepathy. "Things must be set right now. He must realize where he is. You must make him understand what you have done."_

_"Wh-"_

_Again, she hasn't the seconds to ask, can't question the renewed confusion rising up from alarm because she'd been knocked back, overwhelmed by a head-crushing pain that threw her violently against the headboard. It was almost unbearable, the bone-breaking abrasiveness of such a clench, stealing away her breath in the swift grinding madness of her temperal lobe and skull._

_There are pictures, memories, visions she remembers that play out through the pain, reels of monumental footage that burn the inside of her cranium and melt into her conscious. There are voices, too, the low auditory recordings of past years, the one's ingrained into her ear muscle that speak of hidden answers in a mislead search._

_And as instantly as it hit her, it stops, taking with it any trace of the violation that tacked her molars together in an outcry of relief._

_And somehow in the wake of this, after she's loosened the grip that wore her blanket's feathers to bare barbs, she knows, she understands._

_Somehow what's attacked her are the answers to the questions asked of a re-written timeline, the remote comprehension of the how and why thats escaped the grasps of two brilliant Bishop minds to be revealed by a familiarly mysterious entity._

_He'd pulled Peter from broken icy-water once, and twenty five years later, again, reaching out to her before disappearing abruptly, he'd meant to pull him back from a different fragmented abyss._

_Peter's own._

_And this time, she'd be the hand that broke through the surface._  
><em><br>_


	2. Chapter 2

**Part II**

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><p>Too many minutes have past now, since she's stood here, vainly attempting to brace herself for the confrontation that awaits at the end of her waiting knock. Closing her eyes, she breathes deep, takes the plunge, her mantra of now or never rapping on her induction like the hard sound of her fist against his door.<p>

She swallows back a hesitant fear, feeling her nerves exposed, tries to dispel her courage from fading into the died down rain. Her struggle ends at his answer, a swift pull of his door that presents her with a sight burned into ocular memory; three years of being here, in front of an identical house, prompting him and his father toward another dark, death-defying mystery.

He's haggered, exhausted, the emotional toll of a tortured man written in the drawn lines of his face. Still though, he's beautiful, breathtaking under the lights of his foyer, his eyes, a pale blue swallow of the gray sky behind her. And like out here, he bears a shadow of something somber, the two-second realization of her presence that's contoured his brows into a sad line.

At the very sight of her, he's pained, and the turmoil emanates through the soft crack of his voice.

"You shouldn't be here."

She throws her hands up, a defense to his tense air, to the death grip he's latched onto the doorknob to bracket his resistance toward this meeting. And the brunt of his hesitation, his careful anxiety, is penetrating her whole in the place where she stands.

It's a bitter heartache that's arresting her, the desperate, aching kind she feels in every breathe of his body, recognizes in every facet of hers.

But he only reads of reluctance, with a strength that's so immanently aggressive, it's turning her veins to needles, and her blood to pin-pricks.

"I know you don't want to see me, but please, Peter, you have to hear me out."

This carries his eyes to the ceiling, his frustration a force of the nerves she's rubbed on, the fragile, self-tortured one's that are tearing him between patience and evasion, between granting her access or shutting her out.

And as he builds up his defense, his discord reads of an opposing unwillingness, of his battling better judgement, but she won't give in to his self-torment, won't sacrifice the truths she knows to his false pretenses.

So before he tries to dismay her, she presses on, knowing he'll never accept her there, in front of him, unless she gives him good reason.

"Peter he came to me. He spoke to me."

It takes only this, for his eyes to find her face, for his brow to arch in question, and his knob-gripped knuckles to find relief in release.

"Who?"

He asks, and under her drawn fingers, the air breaks, his tense body victim to his own curiousity.

"The Observer."

This deepens his frown, colors his irises in a navy slate of shock and intrigue.

"What? That's not-." he's lost to his own argument. Aware, as she, that present and past have no definition to these strange beings. Injury and death are only relative, when you can't travel time to evade them. "He came to you? When?" He asks this as though he's tasting the question, carefully savoring the meaning with a calculating conscious.

"Last night." she answers, and recognizing the safe-zone she drops her hands to her sides. "He was there. In my room. In my head."

Suddenly compelled to hear more, he pushes back inside and motions her to follow.

"What did he say to you?"

His words are urgent, after he's shut the door, hanging in the hallway in an ionosphere of his eagerness. And intuit to his impatience, she feels suddenly small.

He's pressed for homeward answers in ways he can make sense of, not the left field logic she's about to throw at him. It's only bound to irritate the baffled line already etched in his beautiful face.

"He told me that there are things you need to realize," she says, "Things I need to make you understand."

"What things?"

After his question, she feels her collar warm, a restlessness that started gnawing at her ribcage the moment he'd let her inside. It's encompassing, a cocktail of nerves and fear and self-perception and gravity, all grinding into her skin through his magnetic matter.

Silently he's urging her on, with the eager but reserved stance of his body, and she knows nothing is more important now then he hear her, comprehend her and the phenomenal message that's playing her pulse to a lightening-fast bass line.

So she has to be sure to pace herself, debates in her mind how to do so when the air begins to steel, follows the new form of his posture as anticipation braces him against something unknown.

Already, she fears he'll be remiss to accept her. If there's any way he'll accept her at all now.

Swallowing that panic, she pushes into his defenses, decides to start at the angle she's whittled down so much, it's scarred her five times over.

Herself.

The one that he refused days ago, the one that he's stubbornly, self-justifiably blind to.

"Peter, I know you think I'm not her," she begins, carefully, "I know you think I'm not your Olivia, and I understand why you're confused, but you're wrong."

In his eyes, there's a blue defense of this, and surprise, a dark agate that instantly fuses resistance again into the power of his stare, re-fuels his personal wall back to the reluctance he answered the door with.

This isn't what he expected she'd say, isn't the answer he wanted to hear, and in response he's tensing every one of his muscles so tight, she feels it constrict her own skin.

Fighting the assult, she continues.

"The person I'd been here, before you came, was an identity assumed in a world where you weren't supposed to exist. And I think-I think I'm the reason you do." she takes a breath. "I think I'm the reason you're here now. In fact I'm-I'm sure of it."

The hall grows quiet as her words fall on the mute of his reaction, his complete astoundedness visible in the slack of his jaw, the skeptical furrow in the rise of his brow.

It's a look she's seen hundreds of times before, after he's heard another crazy-ass theory from the repetoire of ridiculous things his father says. As if he has to re-consider what he'd heard right to begin with.

But this time he presses his lips to a thin line, replacing what was once routine sarcasm with an even louder silence. And instead of breaking into amusement, his face breaks into something else, the deep line between his brow signifying an honest consideration of what she's just said, a re-analyzation in the aftermath of an immature notion.

It was almost to quick, his close observation of her words, and it makes her wonder if he's merely just so absolutely desperate now for answers, he'll grasp at the end of what he'd once consider implausible straws.

It's too much to hope, that he feels her, is granting some part of himself admission to the electro kenetic thrill ride that pulses every part of their shared air, that's lingering, in this foyer, to dance under her five aptly tuned senses.

That somehow, he knows it's really her, is too much a strained reality for her to find hope in.

Whatever the reason, his voice is soft, when he questions her.

"How are you sure?"

He seems, in the least, cautiously receptive, but she shifts her weight, licks her lips, uncomfortable suddenly, from the skepticism that's flexed his shoulders rim-rod straight.

"Because of the cortexiphan." she answers, on the heels of his guardedness, "Because of the way that I can crossover, the way that I can manipulate a light box."

When she opens her palms to the air, she knows shes treading the delicate line of his patience, and when he tilts his head in question, his frown deepens, a forte of his struggling conherency.

He's too taken-aback now by all of this to make any sense of it.

Intent he does, she explains further.

"When we were in that hanger, the day this time-line started, I used my-my ability to pry open the forcefield around the machine. I was able to concentrate my power so you could get in. And I remember-I remember being so scared." She still sees it in the back of her mind, his slow pace as he climbs the metal stairs to the Wave-sync, can still feel under her clavicle the pressing hollow of fear, the panic of losing something irreplaceable to the greedy hands of fate. "Peter I didn't want to lose you." she punctuates, "And-and I remember being intent to believe that you were going to come back to me. And that somehow you where going to be okay."

In response there's a quick turn in the hard line of his brow, the beginning grasp of the logic she's offered his perception, and relying on it, she continues.

"What if-what if in-in believing that, I somehow projected it into reality, in the same way I can envision myself crossing over or-or turning on or off the lightbox."

This makes him step back, wrestling with the amazement that's begun to piggy-back his confusion, striking dumb what expectations he had at the start of her visit.

"What if-somehow I-I shielded you in the same way that machine was shielded, but with-with a different kind of invisible forcefield. Peter, what if I protected you, and that's why you're here?"

After this, after she feels spent almost from the force of her words, he's quiet, unmoving, stunned in place before a shell-shocked gray heather finds the inside of his hands.

They drag across his face, dry washing his complete dumb-foundness into the deep breath he blows out. And as he presses his head into his palms, she feels a thick evanescence surround her, the weight of all she's suggested that's taking him over, that's numbed his every synaps then latched onto her own.

For two, or maybe three seconds more, it threatens to crush her bones to dust, but then he moves again, dropping his arms, pinching his bottom lip in his teeth while his eyes fall on nothing dellible. There's a harder pain in them, augmented to a soft blue from the harsh shadows that play on his surface, the process of a private deliberation, a grapple with understanding that's etching itself into every beautiful crease of his face.

And she holds her breath, waiting for any sign of his acceptance, but when he gives her none, merely stands, affixed into his own postulating process, she fears he's convincing himself this is all too irrational.

And it's what she feared, his resistance, what he'd given leniency to earlier when he gave her a fair chance to be heard. So before his silence can re-perpetuate her panic full-force, she tries again to convince him.

"Peter I know, I know how incredible it sounds. But is it really anymore incredible then that I have these abilities at all?"

This is what makes him see her, what focuses his gaze back to something solid, but still, he has a handle on something distant, something she can't put her finger on that fades ash gray into the edges of his pupils.

"I think-I think you bled through because I pulled you back here, to me." she explains. "In a type of-of quantaum entaglement unlike we've seen before. After you created the bridge, you- you should have been erased from history, from time, but you weren't. You came back. Because I couldn't let you go." she catches herself, allowing her words pause before; " I wouldn't let you go."

It's this that fastens him to reality, back to her and this room, in the slow-breaking dusk outside the hall window. And as his inner struggle surrenders his features, she thinks she sees a glint of faith in the slow fade.

"You're the reason I can concentrate this." she tells him, alluding to her power. "That I can focus it. You're the reason I can elevate it, so wouldn't it make sense to say that because it was you I held on to, it would have been strong enough to bring you back?"

He exhumes this, granting it priority with a slow breath of calculation then it's heartache, a languid rendering of the worst imaginable emotional torment that conquers the planes of his face.

"If that's true, then why couldn't you remember me?"

He cracks on the words, swallows them down as pale blue gleams glossy, his self-resolve betrayed by the surfacing of inner pain. But he doesn't give in, only fights the vulnerability by willing it back.

If only he could see now, that he's not alone anymore, that she's right here too, living out the hell of this forced circumstance, then maybe she'd have a real chance at persuasion.

So as perplexity blinds him, conviction becomes her, as heartsore as he's making it.

"Because every action has a consequence." she finally answers, softly, "And I think that was ours. And while you re-wrote this reality, I was already hanging on to our past. That's why I had the visions, the dreams. While you were bleeding back through, so were my memories. Even if I couldn't recognize it at the time."


	3. Chapter 3

**Part III**

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><p>For what seems like minutes he's unresponsive again, immobile in his struggle to process, to accept, and then it's only one hand this time, that covers his eyes, that runs down his face to trail the stubble on his jaw. He's articulating, so slowly, so methodically, that her pulse is a loud baritone under the sound of his silence .<p>

"Jesus-"

This is all he can say, all the audible response he can muster before he's too unnerved to stay still, his axons frantic under the stress of stifiling opposition. So he turns from her and the hallway, finds a surface to brace his astonished state on when he leans his forearms atop the living room's desk.

The scope of what she's said, the grandeur of it all has beaten him down with it's meaning, spent him ragged in the aftermath of his own perusal. There was so much strength in her abrasive attack of his self-percieved reality, that it's tripped him up completely.

And the pressure of his silence barrels into her chest, stalls the breath there as she inches closer to him, his hands now gripping the oak tabletop with a white-knuckle exertion that's molded his back into a solid wall of tight muscle.

She watches it rise slowly and fall, restrained inhalations of acid-heavy air, and she's a memory of reaching out to him, of easing a different calamity with her touch and her kiss until he's taking comfort in the span of her hot skin and wild hunger.

The time though, there's only the fragile atmosphere between them, the one that's pressing the reality of how-this-could-end into a larger fear.

She's no idea at all what he's running through his head, what the wheels in his mind are spinning him to conceive so her next words are the last act of her desperation.

The last plea of the love she's pain-stakingly alone in.

"Peter, when he came to me, The Observer, when he talked to me, he said that I have to make you understand what I've done." he makes no response to the sound of her voice, and it encourages her to press on. "And then I was knocked back, and-and somehow I was seeing memories differently, I was hearing them and they didn't raise questions anymore but pointed to this answer. That it was me. That I'm the reason you reappeared. I'm the reason you're still here."

Still, nothing from him, only his turned back in the self-suffering confines barricading him whole.

"Peter he showed me all of this, so that you would know, so we both would." she tells him.

"I know how this may seem. I can understand how-how difficult it may be for you to grasp, but Peter, you have to believe me. " she hears the hoarse in her words, the roughened plea of an exhausted conviction. "You told me once that they can't be wrong, the Observers, that you don't see how they could be, so I'm asking you now, to trust yourself, and to trust what I'm telling you."

Whatever part of her heart still under her ventral bone, drops to her feet, a swift dominion of gravity that's sank a bitter dejection into the whole of her, it's laced yearning with the pain of heartache, an un-mendable break of her soul if he refuses to believe her.

"This is your home, Peter. This is your home, because this is where I am. This is where you're meant to be."

The same certainty she felt years ago, when she crossed a universe to save him, she feels now, humming below her flesh, coursing the phantom sensation of his static into her every nerve fiber, burrowing through muscle and tendon straight through to her bones.

And now, it's only making every calcified pore ache for his notice.

It's why she's being buried alive by his quiet, his only response a drop of his head, a shallow intake of breath that makes his shoulders arch, his fingers gripping the outside anchor to his inside world more fiercely then before.

"Peter, please say something." She finally says, unable to physically bear anymore dimissal.

And it isn't until she begins to feel self-conscious, diminutive among the magnificence of her cause in the first place, that he relinquishes his silence.

"Incredible would be an understatement if there was a word to describe everything you've just told me."

His words are quiet, cracking, hailed from the suffocating place he's just pulled himself out of. And with another drawn breath, he composes himself, releases his thoughts from their capture, and the air in every corner of the room is grateful for the new ease of his body.

"Because as jarringly insane as it all sounds..." he turns to her, leaning back against the desk, "Impossible isn't that word."

Not quite knowing what to make of this, she frowns, but it's the softness in his eyes that comforts her apprehension, the victorious finale of an internal struggle flecking a promising tourmaline along the outskirts of gray.

"Four years ago, I started to believe that nothing is inexplainable. Or unbelievable." he begins, half-sitting on the edge of the wood. "And this, all of this, happened somehow. And I know, that there has to be an answer for it. "

For a nano-second his eyes reach again to somewhere she can't find, and it's when he presses his lips tight, curves his brow in a curtain of desolation that she feels the true extent of his past pain, the secret weight of existing in a world without recognition, without a true place to call home.

But as soon as it appeared, it's gone, replaced with an array of hopeful desperation, the same one that allowed her enter when she first got here.

"And after everything I've already tried, after all the other possible reasons I've failed to make sense of, this reason of yours is the best explanation I have to be standing here."

There's a kind of hope that crawls into her chest wall, implodes the muscle there, hinges itself on the underlying acceptance in the root of his words. And if she could, she'd reply, but her every nerve-ending is anesthetized by the mass of his power, torpid under his invisible influence.

So now it's she who's quiet, benumbed in the air he's turning thick again when he turns his head down, concentrates on nothing when he stares at the same,

"When I was in that machine..." he begins, dragging the thought from his far away place. "Walter had found a way, to pull my consciousness forward. And I saw the future, I saw the destruction we'd caused by destroying a universe."

He looks at her, with an ache so strong, it echoes into her, a flash of a tragedy lived through fantasy, and it softens the line between his brow, a tender pain fused into slate gray that pushes into her empathy.

"And he told me we could do it over." he continues, "That we could use the machine again to make a different choice. He said, we could cheat death, we could cheat fate." For a second his mouth curves, not out of joy, or amusement, but in the sad wretch of the consequence purveyed in his words. Then it falls, and he's sober again, somber under the weight of his memory.

"And if anything were to go wrong, you would be our safeguard. You would have the ability to counteract the unpredicted circumstances.

And you did. And I think in more ways then one." His eyes change now, away from his own cogitation and into the room they're standing in. And they catch in the light of the lamp behind her, a beautiful swell of blue-gold that sends her pulse into a dizzying frenzy.

"You weren't only the safeguard for worlds,Olivia, you must have been my failsafe, too."

She knows this look, this thick lashed concentration of his soul, this deep-seeded emanation of all that makes him stunning and magnificent in view of her surrender. This is the way he's looked at her, for the past three years, with a tenderness that illuminates from the inside out.

And what it means crashes into her, knocks down her nervosity to arrest her with, hope, gladness, and the ten million and one adjectives this part of him exhilarates her person with.

"I don't know how, but Walter must have known you would be." there's a tiny glint of something lighter now, in the upturn of his mouth. Then it washes away, when he stands straight, opens a hand in the air and motions it toward her. "So because of everything I do know, in it's own way, all of this makes an absolutely perfect sense."

There's nothing held-back or resistant anymore in his posture, it's been replaced by something secure, a self-assurance that's titillating the room, and her body and the slow-change of their shared air. And his eyes moor that certainity, a delicate grey-blue color burn she'd seen four days ago, when his kiss fused into her everything she wants most.

And he walks to her, closes the space between them in three strides of a slow pace.

"And if there's anything I have to trust in..." he says, reaching out, burning the side of her face with the touch of his hand. "If there's any proof that this is my home, that this is where I'm meant to be, it's the way you're looking at me now."

Everything she is, conforms to his ascendance, her self-measure exposed and forgotten under his obsidion supremacy, the glory of his half-lashed gaze darkened with the same desire that's fueling her senses.

"It's the same way you looked at me when you crossed a universe to bring me back." He says, his breath falling on her face in a hot whisper. "And when we stood in my kitchen and you told me you wanted what I want, and before I got into that machine, and you told me the one thing above all else that made me so desperate to get back to you."

"I told you I loved you."

She says in a same, low whisper, and he smiles, a radiance capturing every handsome surface of his face, drawing love and affection into every beautiful line and arch and crease.

And he cups her face with both hands now, his palms hot against her cheeks, burning into her whole body an impatience that screams only his name.

"And what I knew then, I'm sure of now," he says,"That everything I love I see in your face." His eyes grow impossibly soft, impossibly tender as his thumbs roam over her cheekbones, her jawbone, her lips, as though he's validating his memory with every millimeter of his pale-gray concentration.

"I see my home." he finally says, meeting her eyes again, the one's blurry now with the moist reaction of his own. "And you have no idea how much I've missed you." There's a joy in his voice, under it's hoarseness, and it's drawing up her lips while it's filling her heart. "How much I've wanted you to be here this whole time."

The love and desperation of his gaze, pits in her chest, pulls on every invisible part of her, it's his soul that's ripping out of him, falling to the feet of her own, handing over every beautiful thing he's made of in a dark-blue surrender.

It's an apology, and a plea, a recognition and a promise.

This is the way he gives into her, struck helpless from the truth they both know now. That there's no where else he belongs, but right here, with her.

"And you have no idea, how badly I've wanted to do this again-"

What air she'd have taken, he swallows, capturing her lips with his in the kind of kiss borne of lost passion, of lust and desire and comfort and need. And she devours the flavor with a matched fervor, paunching the delicate flesh of his mouth with her own, swelling it pink, savoring the whiskey honey taste of her personal god. He worries her lips between his, nips them with his teeth and his tongue, and the tickle pulls up her mouth, heats every inch of her skin that's not burning under him already.

Then he pulls back, rests his forehead on hers, his breath diffuse in the aftermath of her pillage.

"Thank you. For bringing me home." he says, his voice a vibration through his body, a current through hers. And she smiles wide, feeling the vast of his meaning in the way he's taking her in, breathing the air she's expelled as it it were the purest oxygen.

"I'd do it again." She states simply, as though she'd been physically aware at all then, of what she could do.

This makes him chuckle, a hot breath that falls into the nook of her neck.

"I know you would."

Damn the consequences, she'd scale heaven and earth to keep him here, at her side, and the way he's holding her, as though letting go means a painful death, she's absolutely sure he feels her conviction. This is his arms before three months ago, when he knew who she was in a world they'd fought side by side in, loved side by side in. She was a tether then, to everything that gave him meaning, to a life where he no longer evaded aspiration but fought to sustain the one hinged in the palm of her hands and the flesh of her mouth. And she's that tether again, his purpose.

As she him, he needs, craves, every inch of her made-for-him skin.

And they'll feed desire later, before his breath falls on her neck, before his bare chest molds to her back, and he's pressed into her so tightly, she feels every beautiful form of his muscle melt into hers.

And she'll wake him with her lips, and he'll respond with his, because there'll never have enough time anymore, to be okay with patient. They'll have re-awoken the nights fused in her memory, her sweat and taste tangled in his, heated by his, his hands and mouth re-commited to the ghost-trails left when their private world tore-apart.

So they'll hold on for dear life, to the other, safe again in the boundries of gratification and existence, the kind they give each other in a world replete with monsters and time-jumps.

Tonight, they'll find home, in each other, the one created in an an alternate timeline to state itself here, in a world where he cheated death because she cheated fate.

They'll be keepers of a fantastical flame, bearers of their truth.

That there's no limit to love.

There's no such thing as impossible.


End file.
